Book Review: Frontier Medicine - From The Atlantic To The Pacific 1492-1941

[healthinfo6]

Reviewed in yesterday's Wall St. Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122783278695963047.html includes homeopathy historical reference which reviewer corrects. Can anyone comment on this? Book looks interesting in itself though it provides another example not to take published material as absolute, especially when referencing history and homeopathy. (Hahnemann excluded)

..."As David Dary recounts in "Frontier Medicine," his often enthralling portrait of American doctoring from 1492 to 1941, what McDowell meant by "experiment" was a fairly gruesome surgical operation. Up until that point in medical history, before anesthesia or antisepsis, a fatality was the most likely outcome of abdominal surgery. McDowell knew as much, but insisted that the procedure was essential for Jane Crawford's survival. Mr. Dary carries the reader through the entire ordeal: the suffering woman's reluctant agreement; her two-day horse ride in wintertime to McDowell's home, a journey so difficult that the friction against the pommel turned her swollen belly black-and-blue; the primitive procedure on the fully awake patient, who was held down by three McDowell assistants.
"Frontier Surgery" gives particular emphasis to the specifics of the medical procedure. McDowell made a nine-inch vertical cut into his patient's abdomen. For 25 minutes, Crawford endured unbearable pain while singing hymns and repeating Psalms. First, McDowell scooped out 15 pounds of a "dirty, gelatinous looking substance," then he excised 7.5 pounds of actual tumor, including the ovary and a portion of the Fallopian tube. Once all the tumorous material had been removed, McDowell turned his patient on her left side to allow the accumulated blood to escape, then he carefully replaced Crawford's intestines, which had spilled out during the operation, and finally closed the incision with sutures and adhesive plaster...
...As Ms. Dary explains, the surgery itself was unremarkable in its simplicity but memorable for what happened afterward. Crawford received no pain medicines, no antibiotics, no intravenous fluids, no formal post-operative care, but she rode her horse home after three weeks and suffered no complications. She lived to age 78, the world's first known survivor of an elective exploratio n of the abdomen and removal of an ovary."...

"Mr. Dary's seeming unfamiliarity with general medical history undermines his narrative. For instance, he writes that in the 1840s "there were allopaths (now called homeopaths) inspired by Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann." But in fact Hahnemann, who founded homeopathy, had coined the term "allopath" to describe conventional medical practitioners -- in effect, his enemies. Mr. Dary also alleges that heroic medical treatments -- the so-called bleed, blister, puke and purge style of 19th-century American medical care -- were superseded by scientific advances several years earlier than actually happened. The shift did not arrive until the country's Gilded Age was in full swing in the 1880s."...
Susan

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